Creative Rule Breaking

"Creative thinking is not only constructive, it's also destructive.  Often, you have to break out of one pattern to discover another one."  This is the advice of Roger von Oech in his creative thinking classic, A Whack on the Side of the Head.  He tells this story to illustrate his point:

"Back in the 1870s, Sholes & Co., a leading manufacturer of typewriters at the time, received many complaints from users about typewriter keys sticking together if the operator went too fast.  In response, management asked its engineers to figure out a way to prevent this from happening.  The engineers discussed this problem for a bit and then one of them said, 'What if we slowed the operator down?  If we did that, the keys wouldn't jam together nearly as much.'  The result was to have an inefficient keyboard configuration.  For example, the letters 'O' and 'I' are the third and sixth most frequently used letters in the English alphabet, and yet the engineers positioned them on the keyboard so that the relatively weaker fingers had to depress them.  This 'inefficient logic' pervaded the keyboard, and this brilliant idea solved the problem of keyboard jam-up.

"Since that solution, the state of keyboard technology has advanced significantly.  There are now... computers that can go much faster than any human operator can type.  The problem is that the QWERTY configuration continues to be used even though there are faster configurations available.  MORAL:  Once a rule gets in place, it's very difficult to eliminate even though the original reason for its generation has disappeared.  Thus, creative thinking involves not only generating new ideas, but also escaping from obsolete ones as well."

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